On encouraging the heart…. This is important as we move into a more emotionally rich, experience-based world. Our networks enable us to extend the heart across cyberspace. User-centered planning, engaging and exciting creativity-focused spaces, and opportunities to follow one’s curiosity wherever it may lead are all part of the heart of libraries. The library should encourage the heart.

When people ask me why I became a librarian, I offer them a two-part story. First, it’s so I could get married to my wife Haley. Her mom (who is an amazing librarian doing great things) told me that I would make a great librarian. Being that I really wanted to get married to her daughter, I took her recommendation and here I am today. The second part of the story was simply because of the fact that being a librarian allowed me to combine everything that I wanted in my life into a career: the opportunity to do really awesome and unique things for my community. I got into this to create and implement library programs. In 2007-2008, the teen community was where the most exciting and innovating library programming. My idea of what a public library should be doing for their communities and the what teens wanted from their library went together like peanut butter and jelly.

The beginning. 2008. Clarion Free Library. Clarion, PA.

Over the next five or so years, my title was Teen Librarian but in all seriousness my role was Teen Programmer. My job was to make the library an exciting and worthwhile place for ages 12-18. We hung out in libraries. I organized some really cool programs and the teens seemed to dig them. I loved my job and the communities that I served, but I wanted to grow. I had ideas about how libraries could grow and better serve not just teens but all age groups in the community. I knew that I couldn’t be just a teen librarian anymore.

Growth. 2014.

I came to the Chattanooga Public Library in 2014 to grow as a person and as a librarian. I have done both very much so. Inspired by my co-workers, over the past two years I’ve dove more and more into library management and planning. I schedule and supervise staff, I get the payroll into the HR Department, I help write grants and budget proposals. I spend a lot less of my time working directly with the public and even less of my time being a teen programmer. It’s a pretty radical shift from why I got into libraries in the first place, but I enjoy it very much. At the core, my work is still directed at doing awesome and unique things for my community. Seeing that just requires you to look at it with a new pair of glasses. Library work is all about people.

Every day I get a chance to look at the amazing work that MeganEmery is doing with the youth community at the Chattanooga Public Library. I see the direct connection she has with the community and in head and in my heart I think to myself, “wow, I wish I was back there doing just that.” But as the title of this post and Lindsey Buckingham say, I’m “never going back again.” I’ve grown and my roles have changed. My work now is to support the people who not only use the library but also help make it a beautiful and inspiring place for the community. If that means signing timesheets, scheduling staff, and focusing more on the back-of-the-house stuff that the public may never see, so be it. Library work is all about people; the people in your community AND the people you share your work experience with. I may miss being a teen programmer from time to time but as long as I can continue to help people, my job as a librarian is not finished.

I am back from three great days in Toronto. Thanks to all at the Ontario Library Conference for such a wonderful conference experience. It was nice to see friends and colleagues and talk with the librarians from all over Ontario.

Information Today invites you to submit your presentation ideas for this year’s Internet Librarian International (ILI) – the fast-growing innovation and technology conference that attracts hundreds of global library and information professionals each year.

We are seeking innovative case studies and discussions on the ideas, strategies and practical implementations that are helping you make a difference to your organisations, clients and communities.

ILI is all about the exchange of ideas, knowledge and experience and this year we will also be exploring the ‘big questions’ which challenge libraries and information professionals – who are we, and what are we for?

Which new technologies, services and business models are the most appropriate now, and where should we focus our attentions next? What changes can we make to ensure our communities thrive? How do we deliver ‘constant innovation’? How can we meet the often unexpressed needs of our customers?

We are also looking for your ideas for the X-Track – an informal space for hands-on interactive activities.

The submissions deadline is 10 April 2015, but don’t delay your submission until then.
Now’s the time to share your expertise, and be a part of this influential and forward-thinking event -Submit today.

Welcome to Cosplay, Comics, and Geek Culture in Libraries! This is an exciting time for geeks of all kinds to be involved with libraries as today’s savvy libraries have begun to embrace new ways to engage library patrons such as fandom events, comic book and graphic novel collections, comic cons, cosplay events, and more.

The intersection of these interests with libraries is a perfect match as libraries are striving to develop entertaining and educational new programs and services that will appeal to not only children but young adults as well as “kids at heart” of all ages. And these new programs and resources fit well with the interests of cosplayers who can utilize the equipment in library makerspaces such as 3D printers and sewing machines to create many of their props and costume pieces, as well as comics fans who can come to the library to read comics and graphic novel collections, video and board game enthusiasts who attend library gaming events, and geeks of all types who are drawn to “nerd nights”, Dr. Who marathons, and Harry Potter socials, etc.

Have you said this in a meeting or a discussion with a colleague? Has this rolled off the tongue when confronted with an unexpected change, a new technology, or another initiative?

Many of us are stretched to our limits. I applaud the folks I meet who have absorbed more and more duties as staffing patterns have changed. Just recently, at a meeting of the Council of State Library Agencies in the Northeast in Cape May, NJ, I dined with librarians who were wearing many hats in their evolving institutions and working hard to meet the needs of the agencies they serve.

However, I bristle when I hear the “no time” response, because sometimes I think it’s an excuse. It’s a catch-all phrase to sidestep learning something new, improving processes, or making a needed but oh-so-scary change. It leads me to ask a question in response: What do you actually make time for?

The attitudes or reflective action, highlighted in an article by Grant and Zeichner (2001), includes open-­mindedness, responsibility, and wholeheartedness. All are important and resonate deeply with me and my philosophy of what librarianship should be about. Approaching something with a sense of wholeheartedness means we are all in all the time, not just when it’s convenient. It means bucking the status quo to do the right thing at the right moment. It means owning our actions as ­professionals.

I am most excited about this evolution of who we are and what we do on the ground and in the trenches. The most important problems and challenges will be solved by the folks meeting them head-on everyday via reflective action. Some of the projects and innovations we’ve seen recently add to a promising vision for the future.

The ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education Task Force has completed a final draft of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This draft is working its way through the infrastructure of ACRL.

As this process has moved forward, I have been excited to see the conversations and debates unfold about how we think about Information Literacy, can better infuse information literacy within curriculum development, think about our role in teaching it, and can stake a claim to this arena of scholarship. Since the initial draft of the Framework was released, one of the oft debated questions has been, “What is the future of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education ?” I wanted to address this, because, to me, the answer is clear. The Framework and the Standards cannot co-exist. The existence of Standards undermines the purpose of the Framework. (By the way, the Task Force has recommended the sunsetting of the Standards since the June draft of the Framework.)

The Mythology of the Standards
Anyone who has spent time in the classroom knows the problem with the Standards in terms of assessment and in terms of curriculum development. Either the assessment feels inauthentic producing data that is marginally useful in making changes, or the instruction must be adapted in inauthentic ways to meet the demands of the Standards.

In my career, especially as a new librarian, I have found the Standards quite useful as a place to go to generate ideas. They have been useful when a faculty member and I needed definitions and mental models for learning. When I have worked with faculty at a department level, it has always been a strain to shoehorn the Standards into the needs of the curriculum. They felt too broad for a course but overly defined for programmatic assessment. They never quite fit.

The times I found the Standards most useful were when I used them as a framework. I used them to outline skills, expectations, and outcomes. Most of the time when I used the Standards, the first step was to revise, simplify and focus the Standards. The top level definition of each standard was the most useful. The performance indicators could be useful with some revision. The outcomes never quite worked. In other words, the Standards always made a nice framework.

Authenticity and Curriculum Development
For me, the Framework has the potential to be a more authentic and useful statement on information literacy and learning. The Framework by design recognizes the diversity within American higher education by not trying to write monolithic outcomes for all institutions. Additionally, the Framework has the potential to better connect to real student learning outcomes in the classroom. The Framework presents definitions, knowledge practices and dispositions that can spur conversations at various levels of the curriculum. The Framework can be the overarching definition (a role played by the Standards) that guides the development of undergraduate general education outcomes, programmatic outcomes, course outcomes, unit outcomes, and lesson outcomes. The Framework engages institutions at a national level in discussions and evaluations of information literacy, but it does not pretend that these institutions will share outcomes in a broad standard. Additionally, it doesn’t pretend that a single outcome can be written to meet the diverse needs of our curriculum. The Framework can enable us to get to real student learning because it can be adapted to align with your goals as a teacher.

The Problems with Standards-Based Education
Critics of the Framework say that our country is moving towards standards-based education and that the Framework moves information literacy outside of that trend. This criticism misses the mark in several ways. First, we shouldn’t pretend that there’s consensus around standards-based education. The growing backlash against Common Core is evidence enough this debate is hardly settled. This is especially true when standards-based education equates to curricula built around standardized assessments. Second, if we believe that information literacy matters in the lives of our students and see information literacy as a form of empowerment for our students, the idea that we should write standards because that’s what everyone else is doing feels hollow. We should create the tool that helps us best accomplish our job. And finally, our profession has the opportunity to take the lead in moving away from the mechanistic bureaucracy of standards-based education. I do not know many faculty members who honestly think that more standards and more standardization will improve teaching and learning.

Let’s Get to Work
To me, the whole point of the Framework is that ACRL cannot write outcomes for my campus. They never could. We may have pretended, but it never happened. The Standards and the Framework cannot co-exist. The point of the Framework is that librarians should write outcomes for their own campuses (as they have always done), in partnership with faculty, administrators, and (maybe even) students. To create the Framework and then retain (or even edit) the Standards is like telling a child learning to ride a bike that we are going to remove one training wheel and keep one training wheel on. One training wheel doesn’t cut it. At some point, the training wheels have to come off. Now is the time.

P.S. This post is not an effort to denigrate the value that the Standards have had to the development of our profession. I greatly admire the leadership of the people who wrote the Standards in the late 1990s. I admired their work as a library school student, and I admire them today. As our thinking evolves in teaching and learning, so should the direction of our professional organization.

—————-Troy A. Swanson is Department Chair and Teaching & Learning Librarian at Moraine Valley Community College. He is the co-editor of the upcoming book from ACRL, Not Just Where to Click: Teaching Students How to Think About Information. You can follow him on Twitter at@t_swanson.